Leaping gracefully from spatial data and GIS to textual data, on Monday 4 March and 11 March, we will have a two-course sequence in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language). These courses provide a small but powerful foundation for the preservation, analysis, querying, styling and sharing of textual and other resources. And I promise to make it both useful and comprehensible!

I’ll be teaching the XML introduction on the 4th, and University of Pittsburgh Digital Humanist Professor David Birnbaum (obdurodon.org) will be teaching the XSLT introduction on the 11th.

For Monday, Mar 4 :

• Have a trial version of the software <oXygen/> installed on your laptop

• Please look over the syllabus’ readings:Text Encoding  by Allen Renear (Ch 17 of this volume), An even gentler introduction to XML by David Birnbaum.  If you are burning with curiousity about the Text Encoding Initiative, you will get an eyeful here: TEI P5 guidelines .
  
• If the XML seems foreign, you might consider pre-reading the html basics article I mention below, which will highlight html’s similarities to and differences from xml.

For Monday, Mar 11:

• Come back to class with <oXygen/> still installed on your laptop
• One of our main exercises will be an XML-to-HTML transformation. While not required, it would be helpful to look over an introduction to html, html basics
• If you want to get a head start on what will be discussed, you can look at David’s pages on XSLT Basics and his Introduction to XPath.

Looking forward to these classes!